PMC's

Just finished absorbing two great hours of History Channel. This show was about the history and progress of Private militaries and mercenary forces that achieve unsung and decisive victories in worldly battles. It is evident that the effect of a private "murder squad" is and becoming the future in personal and national defenses. As we speak there are several PMC's in the middle east directly and in-directly assisting the United States Army in the renovation of Iraq.

But the danger of this revolution in defense is the influence of "dead presidents" and not the one in office. In 50cent terms, "The power of a dollar". This will eventually cause the conflict of who is willing to pay more. The enemy out-biding the original "hit-men" and having them turn the barrels of their guns in the other direction. Dammit , this shit is out of control and will have every country in this world looking like El Salvador and Rawanda.

Vote or die ??

hog wash. We are all going to die anyway. But I tell you what........I'm goin out blastin !!

i <3 history channel

...mercenary armies are definately nothing new...dates back to atleast the roman empire and possibly furthur...i don't know if i would call it the future of national defense though...

Porque---

The present American arrangement, the "All-Volunteer Army" is more-or-less a mercenary arrangement, not to mention the "private military contractors" made up of recently discharged Special Forces, Airborne infantrymen and Marines. Not much chance of them turning the guns around though. Although they fight for a healthy paycheck, most of the PMC's strongly support the war in Iraq.

The opposite of a "all-volunteer," professional mercenary Army is a universal-military-service Army raised by a lottery draft.

I think both ideas have merit, but if I was serving today, I'd much prefer to be a PMC rather than a poorly paid regular Army soldier.

When I was in the Marines, we often talked about becoming mercenary soldiers. At that time (1977) Soldier of Fortune magazine still had recruitment ads for various mercenary contractors in Europe. Most of them were bullshit, but there were a few real ones in Belgium. Two Marines I knew studied French every night in the barracks, because to join the French Foreign Legion, you must speak French. I don't know if they ever actually joined or not. They said they intended to do so.

...i didn't think about our army as a pmc, but i guess you're right...i was thinking more on the 'soldier for hire' lines...just recently in afghnaistan we hired the war lords to fight along side troops right after they finished fighting against them...these kind of people could easily be swayed to switch sides at any point...the us army couldn't becasue they use those great brainwashing techniques in boot camp...

pmc's are effective until a large government gets pissed off enough to level a city with their super missles and invisible planes.

a lot of iraq military training and operations duties have been outsourced

and in such great numbers that there has been a rush by the private sector to fill the demand.

this means that the mercenaries for hire are usually not background-checked.

a lot of these guys come from formerly opressive regimes or assasin squads.

many of them are former south african soldiers paid to murder anti-apartheid activists.

these guys have no knowledge or care for the geneva convention.

to compare this to our allvolunteer army, who by the way are paid far less than the mercenaries, is naive.

for more information:

Dirty Warriors

How South African hit men, Serbian paramilitaries, and other human rights violators became guns for hire for military contractors in Iraq

from

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/note.../11/11_200.html

To an unprecedented degree, the United States and its allies have turned to private companies to fill tens of thousands of jobs once performed only by soldiers, from prison interrogators to bodyguards for high-ranking officials. Several of these companies have even engaged in firefights as part of their work. To Iraqis, the corporate guards are often indistinguishable from U.S. troops, with whom they often cooperate. Yet there is one key difference between the contract soldiers and U.S. troops: With pressure to quickly fill thousands of jobs, many companies have recruited former police officers and soldiers who engaged in human rights violations -- including torture and illicit killings -- for regimes such as apartheid South Africa, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, and Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. Some of these firms perform only cursory pre-employment screening, if any -- making it easy for those with questionable backgrounds to slip through unnoticed.

“There is no interest on the part of many firms to do background checks,” says Marco Nicovic, an attorney in Serbia who serves as vice president of the International Bodyguard and Security Services Association. “For men who are wanted and have arrest warrants, Iraq is a way out. It’s easier, safer for them to start clean there.”

The Pentagon says it is not in the business of policing contractors’ hiring practices -- and that concerns military watchdogs, who believe this creates a climate where human rights are seen as secondary. “The point is not lost on people working in the private security market that the United States has hired companies with cowboy reputations,” says Deborah Avant, director of the Institute for Global and International Studies at George Washington University. In one case, the Pentagon awarded a security contract worth more than $250 million to a British company whose CEO has flouted basic human rights principles from Northern Ireland to the South Pacific.

....“The mercenaries we’re talking about worked for security forces that were synonymous with murder and torture,” says Goldstone, who also served as chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. “My reaction was one of horror that that sort of person is employed in a situation where what should be encouraged is the introduction of democracy. These are not the people who should be employed in this sort of endeavor.”